Don't eat expired salsa (2005/04/07)

You'd think that would say it all...

My grocery store visits have become a little erratic with the basketball tournament, the trip to Tahoe and the imminent departure from Mellon, which has meant some stuff stayed in the fridge a while. Monday after coming back from Tahoe, I had some chips and salsa and the salsa tasted like the salsa was over the hill. But I've had worse, so I just had what I was going to have.

Woke up Tuesday morning at 4:30a with an upset stomach and couldn't get back to sleep. Soon after my whole body just started aching and started making a number of trips to the bathroom. I tried sleeping it off, but I couldn't given the aches, the stomach and some slight nausea. I thought it might be the flu, especially because of all the effort plus cold of Tahoe, but I had no congestion at all and only a fever every once in a while.

I had only a little water and orange juice on Tuesday and orange juice with a small bowl of cereal in the afternoon on Wednesday. In between, whatever liquid I was taking in was leaving in short order and I would get sleep as I would pass out on the couch (couldn't sleep in bed). Better on Thursday, but still couldn't really keep any food in me. I still wasn't right until Sunday.

This was my first real bout with food poisoning; if my body didn't like something I had eaten before, I would just take care of it in one shot and be done with it. I don't know what was different about this incident, but I think I'm going to be a little less cavalier about it. I definitely feel your pain if you've gone through a bout.

And needless to say, no more funky salsa for me...

In the snow (2005/04/07)

Bunch of stuff to catch up on...

Weekend before last, Jamie and Kim joined Carla and I on a trip up to the North Shore of Lake Tahoe to Alpine Meadows and Northstar. Carla had been looking forward to the weekend for a vacation for a while, but didn't settle on the snow and didn't sync up with J&K until later.

Carla and I both attempted snowboarding while the Flournoys stuck with the skiing. We took an advanced beginner lesson on Saturday morning at Alpine, but we really didn't get a lot out of it. I do need to get to a lot lower and bend those legs, which means a lot more squats in the gym. It was pretty much the beginner slope the whole day as I tried to figure out how to turn under control.

Sunday was my first visit to Northstar, so there was a lot of new mountain to me. Carla was pretty pooped and miserable and only did one run before bagging it and taking it easy in the lodge. My overall energy level was fine for another day on the slopes, but my quads were wrecked, so there was a lot of just sliding down instead of working on my form. I also didn't much like the step-in bindings the (newer) rental equipment at Northstar as opposed to the clip-in ones at Alpine. I couldn't really get my toe edge to bit at all, so I think I was spending a lot more energy that I should have been. More to learn.

We stayed at the Tamarack Lodge just outside the main drag of Tahoe City. Our room was pretty small, but clean and pretty cheap, so it worked out well. If you're not planning on spending a lot of time in the room besides sleeping, it might be up your alley.

On the way back, we found out that In-N-Out is closed on Easter (which is no surprise considering their private Christian ownership), so ended up at Redrum Burger. Follow the link, it's an interesting story and a decent burger.

The (next) die is cast... (2005/03/21)

Those of you who knew me back in 1999 may have received an email back in September of 1999 with a similar subject.

I submitted my resignation today from Mellon Financial effective April 8th. After that, I will be contracting full time for SEC Ventures with some folks that I've worked with before. It's not a cushy, safe job, but hopefully it will be more rewarding, not just financially, but also as a software developer and as someone who wants to keep his sanity.

As I told my manager, there are three major reasons why I'm moving on...

Money... usually a factor in these sorts of things...

Frustration with folks we deal with on the East Coast, both business people and developers. I've alluded to the business folks below, but dealing with the developers causes all sorts of headaches and stress as well. I may expand on this at some point, but we can leave it at that for now.

Lack of advancement opportunities (though this is less important than the first two). Because of the size and the composition of the team, there really aren't many opportunities for me to lead a team at all. I'm not sure I necessarily want to long term, but I won't have the opportunity with the folks in SF as is.

I'll probably talk more about the new day job in the future, but I'm certainly excited about working in that environment full time.

What this means for this website is that I'll have the opportunity to update this whenever I want, rather than only when I'm at home and not in the middle of my day. It also means I can spend more time to bring this up to speed as far as being a functional web site and let me provide the stuff I want to provide.

Only two months... (2005/03/20)

So what I thought was only going to be a week or two turned into almost two months. Part of that is my own doing with getting sick after the ToronadoBarleywine Festival as well as getting ready and executing on my basketball pool (let me know if you are interested for next year).

But a lot of the credit goes to Larry Bloom (notanyofthese) and to Peter Abma with his client (who shall go unnamed... ) for generating new requirements on the fly and making our lives as developers crappy.

Mellon'supcoming (PDF) sale of the HR consulting and outsourcing business to ACS actually won't affect me directly; while our group came into Mellon with the consulting business, after a restructuring, our current manager came from the investor solutions (now investor services) unit, which is staying put. It's likely that our group will move upstairs with the other Mellon groups up there, while the rest of the floor would revert to their new corporate overlords.

There should be a development tomorrow which will hopefully help with me being able to keep this website a little more up to date and a little less clunky. You should see it then...

Caught first (2005/01/24)

My aunt caught me... I haven't updated since my day off due to my attack. Rest assured, I'm back to normal, at least from anything from the concussion.

It's been pretty brutal at work, so the updates will be pretty minimal for the next week or so. Today was 11 hours with no downtime for lunch. Tomorrow will be likely be similar. Thanks for keeping me to my promise. Keep it up.

who knows what goes here?

On this chunk, there will probably be links to all the (periodical) media that I normally consume to get the info that I regurgitate to put here, outside of the occasional original thought. Stuff like websites, newsletters, magazines, television, radio, the occasional newspaper, the (currently less occasional) newspaper, or whatever else regular jumble of bits happen to float through my head. This is so I can conform to Standard Blogging Format. But this isn't going to scale to other chunks of the site, so this might not be elsewhere.

Is this at the bottom? If it is (when there's enough stuff in the center column...), this is where my copyright, colophon, badge list, privacy, and any other fine print that you should read will go. For now, it's all... copyright Jason Untulis 1997-2005. So there.